In conventional wireless networks, unrecoverable symbol errors result in retransmission of frames. Frame retransmissions reduce the efficiency of a data communication system due to media contention overhead, retransmission of packet headers and preamble, and retransmission of some data that was correctly received. In a typical IEEE 802.11g implementation, header overhead can add up to 52 μs of delay. Additionally, the acknowledgement timeout (the time that the receiver waits for a frame acknowledgement from the sender before retransmitting the frame), media contention, and frame retransmission all add delay. Applications suffer performance degradation as a result. There has been some attempt to address the inefficiency of frame retransmission, in particular by retransmitting only the erroneous bits in a retransmission frame.